When invited to check out the Poconos resort for a media weekend, I invited along my amphibious niece and nephew, 10-year-old Sage and 9-year-old AJ (for their privacy, those are pseudonyms of their own choosing). Though there are small variations across properties, each site features a hotel with family suites and kid-friendly amenities (interactive games, a junior spa), all attached to a covered aquatic playground roughly the size of an airplane hangar and stuffed to the rafters with water slides, tipping buckets, swimming pools, and other chlorinated delights. There are now more than a dozen Great Wolf Lodges across the country-in northern Ohio, Southern California, the Dallas suburbs, the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, and lots of other places-with more on the way. This pack of wilderness-themed water-park resorts has been steadily expanding since the 1997 opening of the company’s first property in the Wisconsin Dells, which is to indoor water parks what Holland is to tulips.

If you’ve never heard of Great Wolf Lodge, you probably don’t know many 9-year-olds.

Great wolf lodge grapevine groupon